Codemasters offers refunds for Colin McRae Rally

The version of Colin McRae Rally on Steam is a port of the 2013 iOS version.

Codemasters is offering refunds for anyone who bought the recent Steam release of Colin McRae Rally without realising that it was a port of last year’s mobile title of the same name.

Many fans expected the game, which appeared on Steam last week for £4.99, to be an HD reworking of the classic 1998 Playstation and PC racing title and were disappointed to discover that it was instead an HD version of the iOS release of Colin McRae Rally 2.0 which came out in 2013.

Refunds for anyone who bought the game on Steam thinking it was a remake of the original are available until August 19. Codemasters are collaborating with Valve on the matter and the refund should be easy to claim through the Steam account transactions page.

’At Codemasters, we care about our customers and pride ourselves on listening to our community,’ said a Codemasters spokesperson on the Steam forums. ’We understand that some people who bought Colin McRae Rally on Steam are upset and feel that it isn’t the game they thought it would be.’

The publisher has also updated the product description on Steam to make it clear exactly which version of the game this is to avoid any further confusion.

World Rally Championship driver Colin McRae did work with Codemasters as a consultant on the racing game series and his name appeared on all the games in the series up until Dirt 3, which was released in 2011. Colin McRae passed away in 2007.

First of all, if anyone expected this to be an HD remake, they should have seen from the screenshots in Steam that this wasn't the case. If they didn't know what the '98 game looked like, why do they care if it was a remake or not? The game is cheap and probably still better than the old one anyway.

Second, while I think Codemasters is a great development team in general, I think it was nice of them to offer the refunds. If this were someone else like EA, I doubt they'd allow this. CM is one of the few companies that's been around for a while and actually does a good job at listening to customers and cares about their image.

Originally Posted by schmidtbagSecond, while I think Codemasters is a great development team in general, I think it was nice of them to offer the refunds. If this were someone else like EA, I doubt they'd allow this.

Yeah.... 1 week total waiting time is a pretty small window. I guess it's better to have the option than not at all, but for some people on slower connections, it can take an entire week to get a game. The 24 hours after first playing the game sounds nice, but if there's some hardware fault that gets in the way then that doesn't give you much time.

Originally Posted by schmidtbagYeah.... 1 week total waiting time is a pretty small window. I guess it's better to have the option than not at all, but for some people on slower connections, it can take an entire week to get a game.

Really? Titanfall is one of the biggest downloads on Origin, at 21GB. If it took a week - not more than a week, exactly a week - to download 21GB, you'd have a 573Kb/s connection. The average UK connection speed is, according to Ofcom's May data, 14.7Mb/s. Even in rural areas, Ofcom's figures suggest a 9.9Mb/s average - up from a still-more-than-enough 4.1Mb/s in May 2011. I'd suggest that if you have a sub-600Kb/s connection, you're better off just buying a physical disc at retail - and you're almost certainly going to be aware of that.

First of all, if anyone expected this to be an HD remake, they should have seen from the screenshots in Steam that this wasn't the case. If they didn't know what the '98 game looked like, why do they care if it was a remake or not? The game is cheap and probably still better than the old one anyway.
...

You don't need to be that familiar or even to have played the original to know that it's an excellent game and want to play a remake of it.

Handling in racing games hasn't actually moved on that much - see GP Legends et al. The game was a sim with realistic physics and highly rated handling. As far as I can the the iOS game is your typical semi-on-rails touch screen racing game.

If you wanted and though you were buying a remake of the original (which would be easy to think give the original presentation on steam) the game you got was NOT better.

...............

I wish Value followed GOG and Origin in having a refund system in place. Given that a game is tied to an account and DRM'd there's no good reason not to.
Hell, GOG do it without any DRM at all, but I guess they have good will and trust on their side

Even a one hour play time (after downloading I suppose) would give you a chance to make sure things work as you expected and remove stupid situations like this.

Originally Posted by schmidtbagYeah.... 1 week total waiting time is a pretty small window. I guess it's better to have the option than not at all, but for some people on slower connections, it can take an entire week to get a game.

Really? Titanfall is one of the biggest downloads on Origin, at 21GB. If it took a week - not more than a week, exactly a week - to download 21GB, you'd have a 573Kb/s connection. The average UK connection speed is, according to Ofcom's May data, 14.7Mb/s. Even in rural areas, Ofcom's figures suggest a 9.9Mb/s average - up from a still-more-than-enough 4.1Mb/s in May 2011. I'd suggest that if you have a sub-600Kb/s connection, you're better off just buying a physical disc at retail - and you're almost certainly going to be aware of that.

You're mixing bits and bytes. Connections are measured in raw bits per second. According to Akamai, the global average connection speed is 3.9Mb/s. That's 499.2KBytes/sec. 21GB is 21,504MB (Which is 22,020,096 KB)., and would take 12.25 hours of non-stop downloading at peak rate and saturating the line completely. I'm not sure where you got your 573Kb/s number.

You (and Anakha) are right: I made a mistake in the sums. I didn't confuse KB and Kb (this ain't my first rodeo), but must have fat-fingered an entry at some point along the line. (I didn't think of using Wolfram Alpha - I did it by hand!)

So, it's even more unlikely than I thought: you'd need a 256Kb/s or lower connection to take longer than a week.

EDIT: Now I'm off that conference call, I can figure out what happened: 573Kb/s (rounded up from 572.something) over the period of a week would equal 41GB - so I'm guessing when I was entering "21" at the start of my calculation I fat-fingered the numberpad and actually entered "41" by mistake, then proceeded with the various multiplications (times by 1024, times by 1024, times by 8) to get kilobits without noticing. Whoopsie!

Originally Posted by Margo BagginsI wish they would re-release the 1998 title as that was absolutely booming..

Amen. Best arcade rally game ever imho. All the crap they've added since (especially in Dirt) just annoys the hell out of me. They got the balance almost perfect in that game. Sadly I've never been able to get it to work properly on W7, despite reports from plenty people saying it works fine. Graphical glitches (missing textures) and audio problems left right and centre. Must give it another go sometime as I'm pretty sure I've changed most of my hardware since the last time I tried.

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